Star Citizen Insurance Drama
Welcome to some more Star Citizen with a bit of Drama and hopefully a resolution to it at the same time. We are talking about Ship Claim Timers and a dev response.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.12 has actually seen a solid implementation of a lot of new content and more coming online with dynamic events that they can turn on and off… it’s actually pretty hype… expect to see some cool stuff soon…
However something that vastly missed the mark is the changes to the Insurance or Ship Claim Timers and expedite fees for ships.
First briefly there were some good bits here… starter ships were bam quick and easy to get back… just straight away… lose your starter just claim it and you have it again. Nice and quick. That makes sense to me as well… and makes them useful throughout the game for a variety of things as they are cost effective ways to mitigate risk.
However pretty much every other ship that needs to be claimed AND/OR Expedited had a huge increase in time and cost associated with them… this is actually prohibitive to gameplay.
This scales with the larger more expensive ships too a MSR could have you waiting 45 mins or 15 mins if you expedite it for 7000 aUEC.
An 890 Jump could have you waiting 4 hours or an hour if you expedite it for 40k aUEC.
A lot of Star Citizen players were rightly annoyed by this seemly ridiculous change.
SaltEMike summed up pretty well the issues and community sentiment for these changes:
Is there really a point to something like this until we have proper persistence in the game? I feel like 90% of the time I am reclaiming due to bugs. Not to restock my ship. I get that we need to start working on these longer term goals, but I think due to 30k errors still being really problematic, I would rather prioritize something else from a development standpoint.
Prioritization is always mentioned, I may not see the big picture here, so if not help me out.
CI’s Zyloh replied to this:
As mentioned in the original post, we fully acknowledge bug-driven reclamation, and finding the sweet spot between supporting a live service and testing is a hot topic internally. However, the team does need to test these economy specific scenarios early. This type of testing is a key step in moving forward towards the intended experience, and isn’t exclusive to just insurance prices/timers. In fact, I’d expect similar “frustrating tests” to come when it’s time to test physicalized inventories too. In the end, these early tests are essential and help us isolate pain points we can address sooner rather than later when their impact is more detrimental.
Again though, it’s important to remember that we’ll be monitoring the in-game statistics and feedback threads to evaluate the impact of this change. We’ll work to iterate and optimize until we’re in a good place, and will be doing our best to prioritize both short term and long term solutions. Bear with us!
The situation has evolved In a more recent post Too early for claiming time and price changes that says Big ships should absolutely be expensive to expediate and long to claim but now is not the right time…
Zyloh Replied
As we mentioned in our original messaging, we’ve been monitoring the in-game statistics and feedback threads to evaluate the impact of this change. We said we would work to iterate and optimize until we’re in a good place, and we meant it. The team is currently checking in some changes to reduce wait times, so you’ll soon (targeting tomorrow) find the wait times have been reduced by quite a bit.
Specifically, outside of starter ships and ground vehicles, the maximum wait times have been reduced by 40%, with the minimum wait time being reduced by 50%.
As a reminder, we’re working to prioritize both short term and long term solutions and will continue to iterate until we’re in a good place. Expect more tweaks and changes as we continue to monitor.
Someone replied with “Caved”
To which Zyloh then responded again with
I wouldn’t consider it caving. We’re doing exactly what we said we would in the original message. Wait times will continue to be iterated upon until we find a sweet spot… and then we’ll iterate some more.
So it sounds like the issue has been acknowledged and is going to be fixed or at least addressed in the next day or so which is good. The changes that they had here were just too early to implement… if they have a stable game and a proper economy and all the ships easily available and no 30ks knocking at your door constantly.
When there are so many bugs that can cause you to need to respawn your ship… you don’t want it to punish the player.
At least CI have actually answered and put in a plan of action so credit to them for that…
And let’s hope that it’s a solid change in timers across the board! If it’s not then expect another video on the subject!